A Promise Kept - Anna

Luke 2:36-38

You’ve heard it said thousands of times: “God always keeps his promises.” But does your patience ever wear thin waiting for a promise to be kept? Do you ever start to doubt because you’ve waited so long, and it doesn’t look like God is going to deliver on a promise you believe he made?

Anna was an elderly prophetess who encountered the baby Jesus in the Temple. She had been waiting a very long time to see how God would redeem his people. Then the day came when Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the Temple to be presented before the Lord. (The Jewish custom was to consecrate a male child around forty days after he was born.) On that day, Anna finally knew she was seeing the fulfillment of God’s promises.

The story of this female prophet sometimes gets lost behind the story of Simeon, an elderly man who blessed Jesus on the same day. The Holy Spirit had told Simeon years earlier that he would live to see the Messiah, and when he saw the baby Jesus he declared that he could finally die in peace.

Perhaps Anna overhead Simeon’s poetic prayer and came over to see what was going on. She was eighty-four years old. We’re told that she had been married only seven years before her husband died and had been a widow ever since. Since women married very young, it’s safe to assume she had been widowed sixty years or more, worshiping night and day, praying and fasting in the Temple that she never left.

Like Simeon, she recognized that the baby Jesus was the promised Messiah. She immediately launched praises to God and then went around telling others. Centuries earlier, Isaiah, Micah, Zechariah, and other prophets had foretold the coming of God’s anointed Redeemer. Now, here, in this Temple, the Promised One was giggling and wriggling in the arms of his young mother. God was keeping his promise.

That promise extends to us as well. Jesus redeems us from the power of sin. He restores a relationship with our Creator. He brings meaning to humdrum lives. He brings hope to hurting souls.

Like Anna, we can see that and give praise to God.

She began praising God. She talked about the child to everyone who had been waiting expectantly for God to rescue Jerusalem.

Luke 2:38